Wednesday, January 10, 2018

SAUSAGE OF THE SEA

I’ve said it before, so it must be true: the Japanese (perhaps
surprisingly) know a thing or two about sausage.So finding myself in a branch of the
NijiyaJapanese supermarket t’other day
I couldn’t stop myself (and honestly I didn’t try to stop myself) buying a pack
of something named Seasage.

It’s an unlovely word, indicating sausage of the sea; so a fish sausage.
Nothing very outlandish about that per se, but the list of ingredients detailed
in the English label stuck on the pack was somewhat surprising.Not all of it - fish meal, kelp soup stock, fish
broth, tuna fish oil, seafood extract – they were all to be expected, I
suppose.

But then albumen, rice bran oil, kamaboko (that’s a version of surimi,
processed seafood, so not all THAT surprising) then something called fermented
seasoning and konjac powder. Konjac, or konjac root (aka devil's tongue, voodoo lily, snake palm, and elephant yam) is apparently
used as a vegan substitute for fish flavoring, kind of redundant in this case you might think, but
it also finds its way into appetite reduction nostrums – it supposedly makes you
feel fuller sooner.

And how did my seasage taste?Reader, they tasted amazingly, and again perhaps surprisingly, of pretty
much nothing whatsoever.